Grip
by Telaka M
Summary: Dance Central Academy is ready for a new year and its new students, along with a new headmaster - the inexplicable Doctor Tan.
1. Emilia

**Grip**

**A.N. **

Wow. It's been a long time since I've wanted to write fan fiction for anything. I really thought those days were over. But… well damn, I never thought I'd get so invested in characters from a _dance game_. Although it happened anyway!

I think the appeal comes from the wide scope granted for developing their characters in a way that is somewhat personal to each player. That's what drove me to start this. To try and explore where Emilia and Bodie and Aubrey and the rest come from, mentally, physically, emotionally. The premise is simply - to see these guys in their last or second-to-last year of school, at a time when people are really just getting into the stride of who they are, and many still struggle to do just that. It's when people start to learn how to live their own lives, and have their own opinions and personalities, and how to stand apart from the crowd while still finding your own niche of people to hang with.

Emilia and Aubrey will be the main focus. Updates won't be regulated, but will hopefully be somewhat steady. And hopefully every character will have their moment.

So, enjoy! Reviews are always welcome and read.

-Telaka

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**Prologue, Part 1**

In the settle of dusk the smell of late-summer flowers lingered; overly sweet, not perfect. Smoke from a long day of outdoor cooking, salt, processed sugar, alcohol, all lingered like stale tastes on the tongue. A thousand good memories were beginning to settle into hazy fondness, into stories for winter, and ideas for next year. Dogs were yawning, children grumping, couples drinking, music lulling. The last day of summer.

She shucked her shoulders to her ears, grunted, and spat into the sand. There was a breeze, the first scuttle of fall skirting around the ankles of the last of summer's gone generous glow. It would be cooler in a week or two, wet in less than a month. People predicted it casually, and talked about going back to school or work, families readjusting, young girls lamenting their fading tans, boys grieving prematurely for their warm beds. Adolescents fathoming their first day of high school. Some so certain. Others feeling cynical at best.

She walked onto the sand, still warm, always golden. Wandering far enough to the west led you away from the town, towards the trees and high land that engulfed one of the roads built to travel to the city in the south on. The east was coast, so far as could be walked in half a day before it became the next town over.

North was the horizon, the end of the world. And tomorrow was to be the first day of a new life. It would start with a drive and end in a strange bed and she spat into the sand again, thinking about tomorrow and about last summer. How the house was full of anger then, shouting and spitting, and broken objects until finally he left to go live with his new woman, and they both locked the door against that and kept a vow never to see him again.

She headed west.

The school was renowned. Nestled in the countryside outside of a big and important city, it had its own lake. She remembered seeing its glistening photograph in the brochure, and remembered her mum's somewhat tight, desperate words; "You have one God-given talent on this whole Earth Emilia. Lord knows why it's dancing, but it is. Don't waste this opportunity. Not this one."

The scholarship was unique to one new student each year. It allowed you to transfer in on your junior year, and it was a perfectly free ride. It was a way for the school to hijack talent for its prospective. A way to ensure a stronger alumni, to self-preserve. They allowed themselves to adopt a poster child in return for their subsequent fame, success, reputation. A perfectly reasonable win-win situation.

And Emilia was, for all intents and purposes, a rhythmic prodigy. If nothing else. The school had hedged its bet, essentially. On a sixteen-year-old girl who could barely spell the name of the State she lived in.

To her left the ground began to rise so a pale cliff face slowly yawned up and took the road and the town and all its people away from her. The sea idled to her right, and along its glassy top the last of the sun's yellow presence faded, until she was walking in just a bruised purple light.

Her shoes bounced gently off her chest, the sand gasping slightly with each lazy step she took. She should have been home, packing, double-checking, eating dinner for the last time with her mum. Indulging in sentiment and allowing time to become excited. But, dance academy or not, Emilia hated school. And currently chose to begrudge many other things.

A pile of driftwood came before her. Burnt and scored with adolescent names and misguided messages of love. The sand was well trodden, grooved, footprints coming and going from the sea and the way back into town. Frivolity and fun, people her age running back and forth with each other, kissing, fighting, laughing.

She kicked the prints away, bare toes stubbing deep into the sand, dragging it back up in clumps, tossing it over the driftwood, towards the tide, into the encroaching night and slow wind.

Then she threw herself down with a loud grunt, and closed her eyes.

Time passed and the air cooled enough that her skin began to prickle. She had thrown her arm over her eyes. Maybe she would lie here forever, or until they scooped her up and threw her away. Because she did not need to go to this school. She could dance at those clubs that paid the girls to stay on stage and excite the men. There was good money in that. Enough money that she could pay for her own apartment, and buy her own groceries, and maybe even get a dog—

"Yo."

She'd heard him coming just a minute before, shuffling through the sand with his long, easy stride, going as ever like the world never moved any faster than he did, and so he never had to rush.

She kept her eyes closed under her arm, tried to keep her mouth straight and relaxed, her breathing steady. Like she was asleep.

"Didn't anyone ever tell you it's dangerous to fall asleep on the beach at night?"

There was a heavy thud by her ear, some soft sand sprayed her arm.

"That's when the seagull's get you. Not that's there's anything of you to eat. Didn't you ever hear of a cheeseburger?"

Sighing, keeping her eyes covered with her arm, Emilia decided to acknowledge his company.

"Bodie, didn't your mum ever tell you when to shut it up around a lady?"

He spilled with genuine laughter. "Lady? There's a lady here?"

Emilia shot up, feigning offense. "Bodie men have died for less."

She swung a fist towards his shoulder but, grinning, he threw a jacket over her face and leaned back as she stumbled head first into the sand.

"Your mum said you might need this, if you're planning on staying out all night again."

Emilia untangled herself from her own garment, a short leather jacket that she had had for as long as she'd had a prominent chest. Much to her mother's dismay it was often all she would wear out on top of her usual roster of tank tops and torn jeans. She threw it on, then lay back in the sand.

"Emilia—"

"What? What do you want me to say Bodie? That I'm jumping for joy? That I should feel like the most privileged kid in the world right now? Because I don't. I won't."

Bodie leaned back into the sand as well, so that his face was at Emilia's knees and so that he could poke her shin playfully.

"I wasn't gonna say a damn thing Em'. Except, if you don't come back into town with me tonight, and get in the car with me tomorrow morning, and come with me to the school, I'm gonna take every one of your stuffed dogs and drown them in the sea."

Suddenly he was struck, not gently, by a knee in the eye. "Damn it!"

Emilia grunted. "Yeah, that's right."

Bodie laughed before springing back up in one powerful leap onto his feet. With almost no effort he took hold of Emilia's arm and saw her up onto her feet as well. She pushed her hair away from her eyes to reveal a deathly scowl.

"You'll knock 'em dead tomorrow Em', I know it."


	2. Aubrey

**A.N**

Aubrey… is going to be a lot of fun to write, I think. Especially as I get more into this, and as each character develops alongside the others. She might change the most, and develop the most, but I reckon she'll stay the truest to herself. She has that sort of personality, I think. Very intelligent, almost shrewd, but strongly convicted and clever about everything. Emilia is my favourite from the game, but I think Aubrey is going to be my favourite to write.

I forgot to mention my tumblr account in the last post, because it's where all my fan art goes. But my username is art-chew. Hope to hear from you over there!

-Telaka

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**Prologue, Part Two**

The last good heat of summer lingered on her bare arms, its light pouring through the handsome bay window onto soft skin that could barely hold a tan. She rested a shoulder on the glass and leaned her weight into it, staring half-blindly into a long lush garden where a few guests still lingered from the party, laughing, drinking, networking; her father down there somewhere as well still, strategically walking through the fray of rose bushes and business talk.

She might have been doing anything else with her last day of summer. Walking the dogs by the lake. Taking one of the horses out for a run around the course. Shopping, alone. But her room was in distress, half-packed with clothes flung at every corner and surface. Because in less than 12 hours she would be leaving this estate for another that she had no desire, and no choice, to go to.

Business politics. Strategic promises. School. Bullshit.

She had stopped packing this time at a trite dilemma. There were photographs she wanted to pack. Of family and friends, ones of her father. But the argument from a few small hours before still kept an ugly head risen in her gut. She simply seethed at the thought of his once younger face and hers, happier and more innocent them both, sitting between her silks and her cottons as if nothing had ever been said.

A piercing laugh knocked the still out of the summer air and Aubrey snapped her head around, peering back into the garden. In a few hours it would be dusk, and everyone would be gone. Deals broached, tossed around, and finally met. Partnerships gained, lost and realigned. A modest American business empire shaping and growing on her back lawn; her heritage and future all coming together for her.

Behind her the bedroom door creaked. She prickled instantaneously with territorial fury, springing up on her bare heels with her fists clenched and her teeth gritted together. But there was no one there. Just another breeze—

Suddenly a pale shadow leapt onto her bed and she jumped back. Then, soft purring, as a long, ragged cat wove in between piles of lingerie and socks and silk pyjamas.

"Dammit Daze. You stupid cat."

Aubrey dragged herself away from the window with some reluctance and threw herself onto her expansive bed instead. The cat, grey-white and old, hissed softly, but then picked its way around her sheets and clothes and climbed onto her belly, where it curled around itself and begun to groom fastidiously.

Aubrey looked at it for a while, as if contemplating her trust in its ability to keep secrets and tell lies. A thousand words on the tip of her tongue, desperate and angry to get out. Then she blew out a long breath and sat back up. The cat hissed again, leapt – with some impressive style for a feline geriatric – off the bed, and disappeared under the mahogany frame. A few minutes later she could hear him purring again.

"Talking to yourself is the first sign of madness you know," she muttered, standing up again.

She grabbed a pile of head scarves from a one-hundred-year old French pine dresser. Hand-painted silks from every continent that produced them. They were of almost every colour, every pattern; combined they were worth more than many homes. Every one bought by her father as a peace offering at some time or another. She was not stupid. Aubrey knew how their relationship worked now.

She threw them aside and snatched up a headband made of hard, black, cheap plastic. She'd traded it at school for a bracelet worth as much as a modest car. It had belonged to a quiet girl whose mum had taken Aubrey home one day when no one had come to pick her up after tennis practice. Her father, to this day, had still not noticed the missing bracelet.

Aubrey put it on. It held back her thick, tangling hair and gave her a chance to really look around the spacious, now copiously messy room.

She already had enough things packed. But not nearly a fraction of what she owned. If she had been in a particularly pyro-manic mood she might have just made a bonfire to send the rest of the guests home with.

Time continued to pass though, and gradually, with precision and care to each decision, her cases filled. Until there was as much in each leather hold as there was left in the antique furniture.

Aubrey knew how very little of her life she could control. But she could at least decide to leave behind as much of her father as possible.


End file.
